


venice, son

by tin_girl



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, Mostly Canon Compliant, Nico runs away, Post-Series, Roadtrip, and almost dying like 3 times, and then goes in circles because he's tired and wants to go to venice, and trying to shadow travel every 5 minutes, i just took the canon solangelo and added a bit of angst, not really - Freeform, okay a lot of angst, this fic is just nico being emo, will is there trying his best
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-29
Updated: 2020-04-29
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:26:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23914537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tin_girl/pseuds/tin_girl
Summary: Country roads, 1,5 boy(s), course nowhere.Or, Nico, running away from Will, running towards himself.
Relationships: Nico di Angelo/Will Solace, Past one-sided Nico di Angelo/Percy Jackson
Comments: 12
Kudos: 44





	venice, son

**Author's Note:**

> this is a very mismatched, inconsistent Frankenstein monstrum of a fic but I tried my best. Also, while writing it I kept listening to Augustana's Boston but the real song of this story is My Heart is Buried in Venice, 100%
> 
> Mostly, it's Nico hoping to deal with his past homes so camp can be it and running away because being in love is scary, ha

Find what you’re afraid of most and go live there

~Chuck Palahniuk

Nico is standing at a crossroads, running away from how he’s fucked everything up again.

He hasn’t been shadow traveling much but his hands are fish-cold anyway.

Sometimes, he bites the tips of his fingers to make sure they’re there.

Sometimes, his teeth close on nothing.

A car passes by, and then silence for long minutes. He could put his thumb up and try to hitchhike but who would stop for something half-dead like him? He has blisters from walking himself to sleep, brown stains on the insoles of his ratty sneakers, and he could hole up somewhere for a few days to rest instead of running but if he stayed somewhere for too long, he’d have to learn if anyone would come for him, and he’d have to get over how no one would.

There are green fields around him, stretching into forever, and he never got used to it, how America sprawls wide, all empty spaces, nothing like the crowded boot of Italy. He flexes his hands, his fingers still there, and knows he’s too weak to go to Venice where he had Bianca and Italian lullabies and nightmares that weren’t about people hating him.

He’s still going to try.

He waits for another car, counts to ten when it drives past, and walks.

*

It’s not like he loved it in Venice. If death was an animal (and isn’t it? isn’t it?), its breath would smell like Canale Grande, and he’d always known it, even when he was six. Venice was where he’d suck on his thumb when asleep, and where Bianca wouldn’t share bread with pigeons because she loved it too much, smiling with delight around the bites, and where water stunk so bad that Nico could pretend he couldn’t smell the war coming.

*

He sits on the curb next to an empty gas station and examines his shoes. He should get new ones – _steal_ new ones – or, fuck it, tape them whole, anything. He says a half-hearted prayer to Hermes, half-joke, half-serious, and shakes his head at himself for expecting a new pair to drop into his lap just like that. He puts his hands under his armpits to warm them, even though they’ll stink of sweat later, and counts the bones deep in the earth.

Someone died ten feet from where he’s sitting, a sharp turn and a speed limit. The death of it wraps around him like a hug, and he relaxes into it, listens to the weak echo of how a drunk soul was lost here.

It’s one of the things he confessed to Will during his infirmary stay – three days turned into three weeks – how he always knew when someone had died somewhere and how the knowledge wasn’t scary but comforting. It was meant to be a test of a sort, and Nico expected Will to recoil, judge him, think him a freak. When he didn’t, Nico just didn’t know what to do with it, what to do with _himself_.

There’s a hole in the sole of his left shoe and Nico pokes it, gets up, leaves the shoes behind and walks on in his socks.

He only leaves the shoes there to prove to himself that no one is looking for him and so no one will find him, except, two days later, someone does.

*

He _did_ love it in Venice, how Bianca would give him twelve kisses all over his hands every morning, “for each hour of the day,” how the stone was old and remembered, how the bones buried deep under the cobblestones never went dry.

*

He fell asleep cold, curled up under a tree, knuckles in mouth, but wakes up warm, a blanket thrown over him and a pair of leather boots lined up neatly next to his feet. There’s a ripe banana stuck into one and a candy bar in the other.

He eats the banana first, and then looks around. The edge of a field, the middle of nowhere, and no one in sight, but he feels watched anyway. He presents his middle finger to the nothing around just in case and then tries the boots.

They’re a perfect fit.

*

His third night in the infirmary, Nico remembered Bianca so much – something about the _smell_ there – that his lungs seemed to collapse in on themselves, deflating into something sad and defeated, all that air and he couldn’t take a breath.

Will made the mistake of reaching out to hold his hand, and his fingers went right through it because Nico was trying to wrap himself in darkness and go someplace that would have her all over it and burn it to ashes.

“No,” Will said, “ _stay_.” His hands hovered over Nico’s body like he didn’t know what to do to keep Nico there. He settled for placing his hand flat on Nico’s chest, and it felt so very _there_ through Nico’s shirt, like touch was knives. Still, he must have been a masochist because when Will tried moving his hand away, Nico arched towards it and there was no way to do it but inhale, so he breathed his lungs back full in hope Will would touch him again.

Will didn’t.

*

He dry-heaves, and props his hand on the wall to keep himself from putting his forehead on the toilet seat. His head is spinning and his spit tastes like illness. When he leaves the stall, there’s an apple on one of the sinks, and a half-soaked note pinned under it, folded into a small square.

You shouldn’t accept food from strangers, the note says, and Nico washes the apple, eats it.

He eats the note later, too, and whispers it into his sleeve:

“An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”

He almost forces himself to retch.

*

Will was angry at him, later.

“Your body temperature is too low,” he said in a calm voice, piling blankets on top of Nico, one after another, three, four, five, hands steady but something frantic about him anyway, a jerking knee, a tapping foot, the white of Nico’s skin reflected in his pupils and how unfair that Nico would ruin those eyes just by being looked at.

“Why would you _do_ that?” Will asked with a desperate edge to his voice, but folded his palm over Nico’s mouth like he thought a reply would wear him out. Nico reached out slowly, flexed his fingers back to flesh and wrapped them around Will’s wrist to still his hand. He fell asleep like that, breathing into warm skin, the smell of life itself.

*

Ghost boy, zombie boy, death boy, and Nico’s gnawing on his finger, checking if it’s there again. He tried to make a jump, from one shithole to another, and almost lost himself. Just a few miles but he couldn’t do it, and now he’s stuck in some ditch halfway to nowhere, feeling sick to his very bones, like he has flu there, inside, rather than marrow.

When it starts raining, he lies down on his back, fisting grass in his hands, and opens his mouth in some pathetic, pathetic attempt at saving himself. The rain tastes sweet, and Nico thinks Percy, thinks please, thinks this will save me. He lets the rain fill his mouth, and he could _swear_ it tastes sweet –

Too late he remembers that rain has nothing to do with Percy, nothing to do with Poseidon, and even if it did, so what? Percy doesn’t care, does he, never _has_ —

The next time he wakes up, he’s covered with a yellow raincoat.

“This is getting creepy!” he yells into trees. “And couldn’t you have gotten a black one?”

*

Annabeth visited him in the infirmary once and smuggled him a packet of jelly beans when Will wasn’t looking. She told him that Percy wanted to visit him but didn’t know if it was alright.

Will watched, curious.

When Nico shadow traveled right out of the infirmary and to his cabin, he took the jelly beans with him, but he passed out before he could so much as tear the packet open. Will broke down the door later and dragged him back to the infirmary like a sack of potatoes.

“You didn’t deserve to be carried,” he explained when Nico regained consciousness. “And here, eat the carrot.”

He was too ~~good~~ irritating to be true.

*

He first sees Will from a shopping mall rooftop in a small nowhere town. He’s standing next to an ugly fountain and looking around with a frown, searching for Nico. He’s wearing the camp t-shirt under his sweater, the idiot, and he’s—

Nico gets it really, Will is good at this, Will fixes people, Will thinks he’ll fix Nico, too, like Nico is doll parts to be put back together, and oh, how awful to be somebody’s charity case.

He whispers to bones, feels the earth, lets it shake, just a bit, so that Will stumbles, falls, stares at his feet, confused.

Then he smiles, like he knows, and Nico _hates_ him.

*

He had to stay longer, and Will refused to bring him something normal to eat like popcorn or a cheeseburger or pizza. An apple every morning, porridge for breakfast, and all those _salads_. Will smiling at him all fond like Bianca had, once, and—

Nico threw the salad bowl once and it hit the wall behind Will’s head, vegetables flying every which way.

“You missed me by three feet,” Will said calmly. “Either you have a really bad aim, or you weren’t actually aiming for me—”

“SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT _UP_!” Nico yelled. He’d always been good at throwing tantrums, his blood boiling and earth boiling with it. “I could have a whole army of skeletons here in _three seconds_ , and they would _take_ you, and what do you know about _anyt_ hing, why do you keep trying to be my – _friend_ , when a flick of my hand and I could get you _killed_ , you don’t even _like_ me, what is _wrong_ with you?”

Will stared, unimpressed.

“I will clean the salad up for you, but only because you’d collapse if you so much as tried to take a step,” he said calmly.

“You don’t know anything about me,” Nico snapped, and felt the ribs of everyone who’d ever died there before the camp, felt their misunderstood yellow.

“You’re in love with Percy Jackson, aren’t you?” Will said, like a knife, and Nico tried to shadow travel himself out of there for the last time, felt himself unravelling like a scarf into wisps of darkness, into nothing.

*

Nico is sitting cross-legged on a the toilet lid, trying to slap his cheek, waiting to stop being a ghost. There are swear words scrawled all over the inside of the stall door but there are love confessions, too, _suck my cock_ right under _I would take you back, you know._

Someone locks themselves in the stall next to his, and Nico knows.

He doesn’t get up to leave because if he tried to stand up, he’d only crumple to the ground.

“Hi,” he says, because he still has a mouth, still has a throat, still is a (ghost, zombie, death) boy, held captive by shadows but surviving himself one truck stop at a time.

“Don’t say anything, alright?” he adds when he hears Will open his mouth on a breath.

“I know it’s you.”

“I mean, I’m not stupid.”

“I _saw_ you.”

“I can’t believe you keep getting me muesli bars. Is chocolate too much to ask for?”

“…”

“It’s the smell, _the smell_. Like sunscreen, and you don’t even use it. I guess you don’t have to, ha. Anyway, sunscreen and sand and all that summer stuff. Skin, too, though everyone has that.”

“You don’t smell like water, though, not even a bit.”

“I wonder if I smell like compost.”

“No, _don’t_ — _shsh_.”

“I know that this doesn’t look too good, but I’ll get better and I’ll go to Ven— away, and you should leave me alone.”

The bathroom door bangs open, traffic noise drifting in, and someone locks themselves in the stall on Nico’s left. He keeps quiet, waiting for the man to leave, and falls asleep like that, one knee dragged to his chest and forehead propped where someone scratched a _hearts restart_ into the wall. When he wakes up, he knows the stall on his right is empty but there’s a small vial of ambrosia on the ground, pushed under the partition, and a piece of paper, too, a game of tic-tac-toe, one cross in the upper-left corner.

Nico smiles and shakes his head.

*

When he woke up a while later, Will was a heavy weight on top of him and fast asleep, breath warm near Nico’s cheek, so alive that it stung.

Nico felt the smallest yet, like something folded and refolded, a map made tiny and shoved into some pocket where it had been forgotten, retrieved now, dusty and no longer accurate, in plain sight.

He stayed anyway, and whispered an apology into Will’s hair.

*

Nico locks himself in a bathroom stall, sits cross-legged on the lid, sighs. He rasps his knuckles against the wall.

“Hi,” Will says on the other side, and his voice is like July. “Don’t say anything, alright?”

Nico won’t.

“I know it’s you.”

“I’m not stupid, either.”

“I saw you too, all over. You’re very easy to spot, you know. I just have to look for the most exhausted person in every crowd, and the saddest-looking scarecrow in every field.”

“And muesli bars are healthier. Think of your teeth. Do you even have a toothbrush with you?”

“Anyway, you don’t smell like compost at all.”

“You know, at first I thought I’d just let you do your own thing. I really wanted to, I swear, but I just— I don’t want you to die in a ditch somewhere, alright?”

“…”

“Have you seen all the roadkill?”

“I mean, where are you even going? These past few days, you’ve just made a big circle—”

“Is this all just to be away?”

“…”

“You said you’d _stay_.”

“Gods, I can hear you br— you know, I used to watch you when they first brought you to the camp. Not in a creepy way, I promise, just, you always looked so— you were kind of like a _raccoon_ , I think. Sort of skittish but with those Mythomagic cards, all excited, and— I remember you talking about them, Manticore, three thousand attack power and all that.”

“At first no one liked me in the Apollo cabin, did you know? No one’d suspected I’d turn out to be Apollo’s since I couldn’t sing for shit and well, let’s just say healing is the only thing – that, and the hair. But you know that already, don’t you? That I can’t sing.”

“I guess I thought we were kind of— well.”

Nico doesn’t make a sound but before he leaves the bathroom, he slides the note with the tic-tac-toe table under the partition, one square filled in with an O.

*

When Will woke up, still on top of Nico, he apologized but didn’t get off.

“I tried to keep you here somehow,” he explained. “At first, I just fell on the bed. You weren’t really here, you know? I could see you but not _feel_ you, only a pocket of cold, like stepping into a ghost.”

His breath wavered.

“If I was a ghost,” Nico mumbled, already drifting off back to sleep, “I wouldn’t have all this – me to carry around.

The last thing he heard was Will, stupid, idiot Will, who couldn’t sing, singing him a lullaby, something silly, even though Nico didn’t need it.

*

Another public bathroom, a litany of swear words on the door, soaked toilet paper on the ground, dirty tiles.

“I thought I would get stronger and shadow travel to Venice,” Nico confesses, and for a moment, on the other side of the partition, Will stops breathing.

He gives Nico time to ask him to stay quiet, but Nico doesn’t.

“You’re going to – kill yourself one of these days,” Will says in a strangled voice.

“And that would be a bad thing,” Nico says slowly, trying not to make it sound like a question.

On the other side, Will bangs his forehead on the wall.

“Oh, Nico,” he says. “What will I do with you?”

Nico still can’t believe that Will would bother, over and over again, to find him.

*

When Nico fucked everything up, it happened like this:

He woke up again, two whole days later, and his fingers weren’t there. Will, by then sat in a chair pulled up to Nico’s bed, noticed, too.

“Gods, Nico,” he sighed, elbows on knees, fingers in hair, like a weary parent, and Nico wanted to tell him don’t bother, tell him leave me alone like I know you want to.

“Shut up,” he said instead, more quiet than he wanted.

“Let’s try something,” Will said, straightening in his chair, all determination. He tossed Nico’s old sneakers at him – no holes back then, not yet – and dragged him outside where it was sun and sun and sun, too much grass and no shadows. He had to hold Nico up, and flinched at how there was less to hold up then there should be. He sat Nico in a boat, and stepped into it himself, kicked it off the shore, no campers out on the lake, only blue and the egg of the sun heavy above them, like something substantial that Nico could hold between his hands without hurting himself if he bothered reaching for it, like something that could be reached in the first place.

Will steered the boat into the middle of the lake and held out his hands. Nico stared, the rough skin there, good hands that worked to heal, hands that didn’t know giving up. Hands that, Nico knew, would be warm, only he wasn’t allowed to learn it for sure, wasn’t— adequate, or enough.

“Go on,” Will prompted and Nico held out his shaky not-hands, let them hover above Will’s open palms, and flexed the fingers that were only half-there. Will stared, some stubborn anger all over his face and Nico knew he was angry at him –

(he wouldn’t get it until that first tic-tac-toe cross, how Will had been angry at the world instead)

“Alright,” Will said, and his own hands were steady. “Alright.”

He moved his fingers up, crooked them, slid the tips along the underside of Nico’s own – still not there – like he was trying to coax them back to physical form. He kept flexing his fingers, and Nico couldn’t feel it and couldn’t feel it and couldn’t feel it until he felt it.

“Why in the middle of the lake, though?” he mumbled, almost there, almost back, almost skin, and he’d been right, Will’s hands _were_ warm, and good, and too good for him.

“Well, Percy,” Will said, they’re fingers hooked together now, and no need for touch now that, well, touch, and yet. “I thought it would help you somehow, to bring you back, all this water.”

So, like this:

“ _No_ ,” Nico said, vehement. “No, you’ve got it wrong, I don’t – I— _you_ —”

Will’s hands fell from Nico’s as he blinked, surprised, and Nico—

Nico got the fuck out of there, the only way he knew how.

*

He loses the tic-tac-toe game and keeps the piece of paper.

*

Venice wasn’t good for them, too much water, too much wet, but Nico liked it even then, even dirty.

Years later, he loved it about Percy, a forever of blue, waves rising like the end of the world, and how he wanted to find a way to survive it, how maybe his life didn’t have to be a bite of land waiting to be wringed like a sponge, how Bianca had laughed at fountains—

*

He hated the sun for a while.

He can’t quite bring himself to hate it now.

He uses the last of his money, gets egg in some diner full of people on the road, only here to grab coffee and something greasy.

It’s sunny-side-up.

He smells sunscreen first, and then:

“Eating at last!” Will says, sliding into the booth opposite to Nico. “What a wonder.”

Nico stares at him, feeling something rising and rising inside him, not water, not wet.

“That’s – It’s against the rules,” he complains, and knows he sounds like a spoiled child. Will smiles, fond, and he’s close, he’s here, he’s blond and irritating and _here._

“I’m breaking the rules,” Will says with a self-satisfied smile, plucks the fork out of Nico’s hand, takes a bite of his egg.

Nico stares, can’t believe him, wants to tell him that all this was for his sake, that Nico only ran away so Will wouldn’t have to, a small boat, water blue like undisturbed veins allowed to be lazy under skin, an almost love confession wet all over Will’s hands where Nico hacked it up.

“I could have a whole army of skeletons here in—”

“In three seconds, yes, I know,” Will says, indulgent, and then adds salt to Nico’s eggs, drags the plate halfway between them. “One, two, three. Nothing? Well, then.”

“How _rude_ —”

“I have an offer for you,” Will says calmly, and blue used to be Percy because blue used to be water but blue is Will because Will’s eyes are like that time Nico stood on the edge of a pond in some forest, hope-less, friend-less, Bianca-less, and didn’t die somehow. “You’ll go back to the camp, and you’ll get better, and you’ll fucking stay put for a week, and then whatever you want, Venice, sure, we’ll go on a ship and Poseidon won’t kill us, and you’ll have your mental breakdowns, and I’ll try my best to help, and we’ll get those tiny Venetian masks for everyone, as souvenirs. What do you say?”

Nico drags his knees to his chest.

“I didn’t think you’d go after me,” he mumbles, staring at the table. “You’re the scariest thing I’ve ever seen.”

This, a proper love confession, as proper as it goes.

They’re quiet for a moment, and things are being said in that silence, things that might not be awful after all.

“Wait till you see Hazel’s face, then,” Will says finally, not unkindly. “Word is, she flew back already, ready to shake the whole state until you fall out of some cornfield.”

Nico folds his arms on the table, buries his head in them, and doesn’t cry. Not a bit.

*

Nico has a proof that people are stupid and incorrigible, and it’s this:

If someone invented a time machine and gave it to him, he wouldn’t do the smart thing and go back to when Bianca died to try and save her.

Instead, he’d go back to when she laughed in Venice, the world like a snow globe without snow, back to when he listened to it and wasn’t tattered leftovers of a boy but something whole that could still grow.

Back to when he had her kisses all over his hands like small blessings.

It’s an Orpheus sort of thing and here’s a secret no one knows: Nico prays to Eurydice more than he prays to all the gods of Olympus put together.

*

Will accepts it when Nico tells him he has one more stop to make.

“A week in the infirmary, no shadow travel,” he promises him. “This time, I mean it.”

They haven’t kissed yet.

They will soon.

Nico goes to the Underworld to tell Hades that he doesn’t need to worry because he knows that in his fucked-up, godly way, Hades does. Immortal or not, forever or not, they used to be a family once, before the world went and made confetti out of it.

“I’m going to Venice,” he tells Hades when he gets there, everything around him shadows, everything around him the old memory of bones. That tired smell of how nothing lasts, only down here, everything will. “I’m not going there to find Bianca.”

Hades looks weary but gives a small nod.

“What for, then?”

Nico smiles.

*

Once, there was a boy in Venice, and he was destined to love water but he wouldn’t love it for dozens of years.

Once, there will be a boy in Venice, and he’ll have loved water and he’ll have let it go.

Once, there will be another boy in Venice, and he’ll hold the sun with the very tips of his fingers.

Once, they will all meet, and maybe they’ll hold hands, and maybe it’ll all even make sense.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading and please don't hesitate to comment if you have any thoughts <333
> 
> Also my tumblr is @yoyointhegarden if you want to say hi


End file.
